Prepare Your Website for Online Holiday Shopping

The holiday season is quickly approaching, and that means that the internet will be buzzing with activity and online holiday shopping. The holidays for many online businesses are an expected boost to the bottom line. If you are preparing for “black friday” or “cyber Monday”, there are a few things that you should do to your website to make sure you are prepared for the surge.

There are a million and one different things you need to pay attention to in the preparation for the online holiday shopping season, but here are two of the major things you need to make sure are taken care of right away.

Make Your Website Easy To Navigate & Purchase Products

To benefit from amount of people that are shopping online today, you need to make sure your online presence is easy to use, navigate, and order from.

There are a lot of different variables that go into whether or not a customer is going to order from your website, but the number one killer of sales isn’t high prices, bad refund policies, or shoddy customer service – it’s having a website that is next to impossible to navigate and process an order with.

While the temptation is great to add as many of your on sale items to the homepage as possible, or to clutter your design with calls to action and upsells across the board, the fact of the matter is that people are shopping online to avoid this kind of clutter. They want to get away from the crowded spaces, the cluttered shops, the messy stores – they want an easier shopping solution. If your site is all over the place and disjointed you’re only going to add to their mental stress levels and drive people away in droves – right into the arms of your closest and most fierce competitors.

To avoid these kinds of problems, make sure you eliminate everything that doesn’t absolutely positively need to be on each and every single page – simplify everything as much as possible. Make things easy to navigate and logically placed on the site, and have everything progress in a logical order from browsing to adding to the cart to the act of ordering.

Like A Boyscout……BE PREPARED!!

Not only do you need to streamline your web presence, but you may also need to beef up your online infrastructure as well.

Your web infrastructure is also important to take a good long hard look at before this holiday season. While you may be on a plan that is perfect for regular use, any giant spikes in access or visitor numbers could send your site offline – costing you thousands and thousands of dollars in lost sales. The worst part is that you will lose all of the goodwill from those first time customers forever – they will never see you as a reputable solution.

Make sure your hosting is a solid solution and flexible as well as powerful enough to handle the workload you expect. This is a step that is overlooked by too many people, and something you just cannot afford in the day and age of online shopping.